Google plans to dump Adobe CSS tech to make Blink fast, not rich

Google’s mission for 2014 is to make its Blink rendering engine faster and lighter on mobile platforms. To do this, it’s planning not simply to improve the Blink code. The company is investigating the removal of its current (albeit disabled-by-default) support for CSS Regions, a specification that enables rich, magazine-like text layouts, and Google developers are now arguing that CSS Regions should not ship.

Google’s position is that the Regions code is complicated, with some 10,000 of Blink’s 350,000 lines of code being in some sense Region-related. Additionally, the code is not particularly self-contained. Google developer Eric Seidel argues that it’s hard to reconcile this with Google’s plans to improve performance, especially on mobile.

Seidel recognizes that Regions do address deficits in CSS’s text layout capabilities, and he expresses the hope that Adobe can help find some simpler way to address these omissions.